The Captive Condition (27 page)

An hour later the clouds started to roll in, piling deep and dark above the lake, and Charlie Ryan watched a light snow begin to fall and believed the universe was draping his body with cosmic ashes. At the edge of the sky, hundreds of light years away, entire solar systems were dying, extinguished in an instant, planets far older than Earth with civilizations far more advanced, their inhabitants consumed by supernovas and expelled as precious stardust into the vast, galactic waste, and Charlie hoped his substance would mix indiscriminately with the remains of those ancient worlds and rest here undisturbed for eons. He turned around to face the
Rogue.
From this distance the bulk carrier looked like an alien rocket ship that had crash-landed on an inhospitable planet, its crew marooned on a ball of ice spinning through the dumb immensity of space.

Above the shrieking wind, he thought he heard the voices of his girls telling him to navigate by the stars, and he knew they were mocking him. Struggling valiantly against a wall of blinding wind, his head covered in a crown of ice, he plodded doggedly onward, a task beyond endurance, but he knew that to stop now meant certain death.

A short time later the
Rogue
disappeared below the horizon, and Charlie could no longer tell if he was heading in the right direction. He paused, his body steaming ponderously in the bitter cold. He shielded his eyes with his hands, hoping to spot the gravel beaches and high shale cliffs of the coast and the orange glow of distant towns, but he saw only miles of indomitable tundra, treeless and absent of landmarks. It looked as though some cataclysmic, natural force had drawn back the blue waters to reveal the barren lake bottom, a vast quarry empty but for the detritus of a solitary man charged with the impossible task of surviving this wicked weather.

Cold and hungry he staggered across a sublime, superterranean lunar crust, the wind creating a vast moonscape of shallow holes and diamond-shaped parallel terraces on a jagged surface that, only a few moments earlier, had seemed as smooth and polished as a knife blade. His boots were frozen hard, his feet useless cement blocks, heavy and without feeling, and every step felt like an upward slog. The wind squeezed and smashed his body, and he started to shiver uncontrollably, but shivering required calories, and he hadn't eaten all day. The blood vessels in his fingers constricted and his hands had taken on the unnatural color of a yellowing corpse.

The singing wind became a sustained moan, and for a moment he thought hypothermia must have slowed his thinking because he heard the voices of a dozen deranged seamen. The sounds came from his left and then his right and then from directly behind him. A high gobbling laughter burst out of the darkness, rising and falling until it turned into a hectoring scream. Just ahead, no more than one hundred yards away, the mast of a sailboat protruded from a fissure in the violent jumble of keel ice, and upon reaching it Charlie decided it was time to stop the machine. His jeans and flannel shirt, damp with sweat, the cotton fibers soaked through, were becoming stiff and crackling with ice. He couldn't take another step, and with something like deep gratitude he collapsed to his knees and heaved a heavy sigh.

The mast loomed over him thirty feet high and pointed north like the needle of a compass. In the strong gusts the tangled forestays, still attached near the masthead, whipped around on the frozen lake like a pair of sparring snakes. Listening to the unevenness of his own breathing, Charlie rested his head against the clanging mast of the wrecked vessel, and in his darkening, dwindling stand against the cold he laughed at the absurdity of his situation.

He scraped away the snow and peered through a polished lens of ice, and in the murky depths he perceived twelve faces, bloated, grotesque, congealed together like a genetic mutation sealed within the world's largest mason jar. Their fleshy heads bobbed back and forth with knowing nods, and above the baleful wind they asked the stranger to release them from their prison. But Charlie was in no position to help anyone. He was an outcast, banished long ago from a broken home where he foolishly attempted to seek refuge.

Once again he gazed into the bleak and immeasurable expanse, an unforgiving wasteland endowed with supernatural powers, and glimpsed the girls floating toward him. His daughters, he was sure of it now, had led him to this place, but before he could ask them why, he heard the din and boom of shifting ice and felt a crevasse opening beneath him. A dozen pairs of hands shot out of the black chasm and clasped onto his arms and legs. He screamed, but even as the men pulled him under, he wondered if his boiling brain would sizzle and hiss in the water and if all the painful memories would rise like steam and vanish into thin air.

Madeline and Sophie seemed to know the answer. The heavy flakes that came sifting down from the sky settled in their haystacks of hair, transforming them into a pair of prematurely gray hags, two forlorn visitants from a world where night reigned supreme, a profound darkness, cellar darkness, and in the bracing winter wind they whispered a final farewell to their father before they pitched and swiveled and twisted through the antic clouds and dissolved forever into a roaring white funnel of snow.

“Goodbye, Daddy. Goodbye…”

At dawn on New Year's Day, with the sun little more than a spark buried under a kindling of dark clouds, grateful that my ordeal had come to an end and that the ghosts of Normandy Falls had returned to the cold comfort of the tomb, I marched across the deserted campus quad and toward the Department of Plant Services. Since I was the last surviving member of the Bloated Tick, I was now required to work on holidays and weekends, but the Gonk, poised in a state of constant anticipation, had been busy interviewing and handpicking a brand-new batch of ticks, twelve young men just like me, college dropouts one and all, unhappy, naive, adrift, always poking and prying into matters that did not concern them, eager to be schooled by the master and begin living more authentic lives. As I approached the garage, I wondered how their adventures would be similar to and different from my own, because no two stories are exactly alike, and I was curious to know in what gruesome manner they would obtain their nicknames.

Outside the building, leaning against a wall that glimmered with hoarfrost, his customary predawn cigarette burning bright in the corrosive, lead-colored light, the Gonk greeted me with a grin that, under normal circumstances, I would have confused for the cruel smile of a monomaniacal tyrant. Without having to ask the reason, he seemed to know why I was late for work that morning, and in a gesture of friendship and mutual respect he slapped my back and invited me inside for a strong cup of black coffee.

“Better hustle, Cyclops. These parking lots aren't gonna clear themselves.”

During the next eight hours we shoveled sidewalks and scattered salt on slippery steps and plowed the streets of campus, and for the first time since taking that execrable job at the Bloated Tick, I felt like we were blood brothers, comrades in arms, and from a distance we probably looked like a father and his grown son. While I felt no remorse for the abominable deeds I'd carried out that night, I did lament my decision to leave the city of my birth to reside in this strange and sinister town where someone like the Gonk, possessed with a singular genius for finding the most astonishing solutions to life's most insoluble problems, was destined to become my mentor.

At the end of the day, after we finished clearing the last parking lot near the faculty lounge, the Gonk adjusted the greasy brim of his baseball cap and asked if I cared to join him for a drink. “To celebrate the New Year,” he said, but it sounded less like an invitation and more like a command, and I noticed how his clothes were muddy and clotted with gore.

Back at his cottage I wandered through the cemetery, sidestepping the headstones peeping through the hard clumps of snow, and I watched a single snowflake slip along a marble monument and fall onto the bruised and muddy earth. Like a blind man reading braille, I traced the name that had been erased by the gray roar of the wind.

The Gonk searched his pockets for his keys. “Heard some interesting news this morning,” he said. “Seems a professor disappeared last night after leaving the party at Belleforest. People said he got into a fight with his old lady. Just another fool, I suppose, who fell into the river, out of his gourd on
jazar
juice. Well, the police are sure to retrieve his body sooner or later. Probably find him hooked on the limb of a fallen tree, lassoed by the brambles and branches below the falls.”

He unlocked the door and waved me inside. “Welcome to my castle.”

I climbed the porch steps, but before passing over the threshold I paused to read the name painted in Gothic script on the mailbox flap. I looked at him. “Wakefield?”

The Gonk smiled and jerked a huge thumb at his chest. “That's me. Nathaniel Wakefield the Fifth.” He showed me into the front room and scraped his muddy boot heels against the splintered hardwood floor. Part gallery, part armory, his living room was decorated with antique guns and sepia-tone photographs of revered ancestors. He beamed with pride at a portrait of the college's founder. “We're a strange breed, us Wakefields. At least we were at one time. I'm the last of their number. Our line has been called a race of visionaries. But over the years our blood has been watered down.” Obsessed with the remote and unreachable past, he told me how he hoped one day to sire an heir of his own, and from his enthusiastic tone I gathered the Wakefield name had become for him a kind of irredentist death cult.

“Hey, Cyclops, I don't think you've had the pleasure of seeing the still, have you? While I search the kitchen cupboards for a fresh pack of smokes and a lighter, why don't you go to the cellar and fill a couple of jars with moonshine? I think you'll enjoy what you find down there. Oh, yes, you're in for a real treat.”

Of Colette Collins the Gonk had told me much, and I couldn't help but admire and envy her independence and artistic integrity. Most sculptors, in order to express themselves with such confidence and bluster, required an adoring public and financial independence, but Colette Collins had neither legions of fans nor stockpiles of cash. She never sought that kind of worldly success. Maybe that's why so many academics and critics believed her to be so dangerous—because she never gave a damn about money or public opinion. “It's one of the many hypocrisies of conventional liberalism,” she told the Gonk on the day she handed over the keys. “While they profess a genuine commitment to free expression, scholars and reviewers secretly demand that artists bow down to their authority.”

While she may have escaped from one particular form of servility, she clearly remained a slave to her own imagination, and as I passed down the stone staircase, I felt a tingling in my spine, though I couldn't be sure if it was from excitement or fear. For a while I marveled at the indisputable masterpiece standing at the center of that dank and dripping cellar. Using my cracked and bitten fingernails, I scraped away the stubborn patina from the copper so I could see more clearly the strange story that this Podunk prophetess had etched there years ago with a claw hammer. Like parables carved into a church wall, the still told the story of a cloud-stained and lawless town and its deranged citizenry deprived of a shaping and sustaining purpose: there was a swimming pool and an abandoned barn and a frozen lake. There was a wild party and the figure of a woman carrying a wine crate, and near the back of the still, very close to the sweating limestone walls, there was an image of two men walking deep into a midnight forest.

As I fixed my intense and searching gaze on the still, I began to see Colette Collins not as an artist but as a misanthropic redactor of black books who'd chronicled persistent legends and sent back insanity reports from some faraway place that existed at the margins of civilization. With pleasure I poured the grain alcohol into an empty jar, and I thought how, since I had a peculiar talent for ekphrasis and hermeneutics, I should put pen to paper and describe in detail the meaning of those final images before someone else came along and interpreted them as just another awful farce.

I knew it was important to bury all of the people and places that had once injured me, but before climbing the slick steps and joining the Gonk beside the fire, I let my mind turn back to last night and recalled the details of my final encounter with Professor Martin Kingsley.

All over Normandy Falls the New Year's Eve festivities were coming to an end. On the desolate street corners and in the vacant lots of Normandy Falls, spinning columns of powder snow created a kind of dusty light that partially concealed the unlikely figures that emerged from the alley beside the bistro and came staggering down the street. It had turned tremendously cold by then, and the susurrating pulse of frigid air sounded like a child's cries of inexpressible grief, but from the speakers on my car radio a distant, jovial voice faded in and out. “Cabin fever can do some peculiar things to a person, but if the cold weather is beginning to mess with your heads, folks, I do have some hopeful news for you. The
Farmers' Almanac
is calling for an unusually balmy summer…”

I snapped off the radio. “A man shouldn't be alone at such times, Professor,” I said. “Parties are meant to be communal.”

Snow hurtled wet and heavy against the windshield, accumulating in tapering turrets on the worn wiper blades, and it took Kingsley, a man who once believed he was immune to misfortune, a moment to realize he was now slumped sideways in the passenger seat, his head resting against the door. The air inside the car was cold, hostile, uncomfortably quiet, and he sat up with a start, expecting to see Colette Collins flying away on a tired broom and the bistro roaring like an enormous kiln, people leaping from the blast furnace heat, their charred bodies piled around the shattered windows.

To his amazement the bistro appeared undamaged, and the departing guests, maximally drunk and chattering outside on the front steps, looked like the last surviving members of an economic apocalypse in a once productive and prosperous workers' paradise. They took the night air and stomped their feet to keep warm, and as they said their heartfelt farewells to dear friends, they peered into the gray and frozen taiga of the town. Many seemed hesitant to leave, as if they'd changed their minds and were debating whether to continue the party elsewhere. Pretending not to notice their pitiful colleague slouched in my car, they focused their attention first on the smashed cans of beer and broken bottles of booze twinkling in the street, and then on the two young women, one with a wine crate cradled in her arms, staggering from the alley and through the deep drifts of snow.

“I didn't mean to disturb you, Professor. ‘Disturb,' now that's a funny word, isn't it? To varying degrees I suppose we're all disturbed.”

“Your eye…” Kingsley gasped.

“Oh, it's nothing,” I told him.

“I see,” he muttered, not seeing at all.

I could smell the liquor on his breath, thick, heavy, noxious. It anchored his thoughts to the deepest depths of his brain, but somehow he willed the words into existence, pulled them up from the abyss by sheer strength. I'm sure he badly wanted a glass of water, a handful of snow to soothe his burning throat. He slouched so low in the seat that he could barely see above the dashboard. With a deep moan of shame, he wiped away a trail of blood from the corner of his mouth and in bewilderment looked at his trembling hands. Tomorrow would be a day of exquisite agonies.

“I saw things tonight,” he muttered, and I noted with pleasure the slightly weepy cadence of his words. “Things too terrible to describe.”

“You must tell me about these things. It might help if you talk about them.”

“Did I attack my wife?”

“ ‘Attack' is too strong a word. You tussled. You tangled. You made a scene.”

Kingsley shrank against the door. “I've become a self-saboteur, no better than Charlie Ryan.”

“Don't worry, Professor. People enjoy drama. It gives them something to talk about. And to be perfectly honest, the party was getting pretty boring anyway. Your wife asked me to take you home. As a student of yours, I thought—”

“
Former
student,” Kingsley corrected me. He seemed to consider this for a moment and then said, “What are you doing here, Mr. Campion? This event is for faculty and staff only. My wife's budget doesn't allow for parasitical slackers.”

Sheathing my impatience, I said, “Emily Ryan couldn't make it tonight, so she asked me to come in her place.”

“Emily Ryan?” He removed a handkerchief from his pocket and wiped the veneer of academic detachment from his face. Suddenly he looked older, due no doubt to the ravages of drink and the aimless life he now led. “Did you know her?”

“Sometimes the dead will not sleep, Professor.” The sound of fireworks came faintly over the river and a flash of blue illuminated the cracks in the windshield. “Emily confided in me, told me everything, and I think you should know, sir, that—oh, this is difficult—that she was deeply concerned about you. Concerned about your mental health.”

He chuckled. “
My
mental health?”

“Yes, you see, at unexpected hours of the night, Emily would visit me to discuss
Madame Bovary.
She would go on and on about you and provided a number of interesting insights that helped a great deal with my thesis.” I caressed my handwritten copy of Emily's note neatly folded in my pocket. “In time I became her amanuensis, guilty perhaps of inserting words into the mouth of a master poet but remaining ever faithful to the spirit of her ideas. By the way, I finally finished it. My thesis, I mean. I brought it with me. It's a bit late, I admit, but I thought maybe you'd like to take a look.”

“Your thesis…”

“That's right, sir.” I turned on the headlights and put the shuddering car in drive. “And now we start the ‘treacherous descent,' if I may borrow a phrase from your wife's speech tonight.”

I could see the anxiety in Kingsley's eyes. These days colleges and universities specialized in mass-producing emotionally disturbed basket cases, rolling them off the assembly line of higher education with ever-greater efficiency, overgrown children who, unable to control their tempers, focused their anger and frustration on their instructors and innocent classmates. The teaching profession had become a dangerous one, and Kingsley, lacking the proper training, didn't know how to de-escalate a potentially lethal confrontation.

“Where are you taking me?” he demanded.

“Time to return the beast to its proper place in the dark dungeon,” I told him. “Try to stay calm. Your perception is off-kilter. Probably due to that poison you drank. Drugs can adversely affect a man's sense of right and wrong, guilt and innocence. But we must hurry. Emily Ryan has spoken, and it isn't right to keep the dead waiting.”

The oncoming headlights of my car illuminated the faces of Morgan and Lorelei as they walked down the street. Where before there had been only resignation and defeat, a look of triumph now blazed in their eyes. Never turning back to see if anyone was following them, they set out on a journey through the blighted town, a long and relentless march past crooked lampposts, crumbling warehouses, and the lonesome white clapboard church, its soot-covered windows dark at this late hour, the pages of its hymnals hibernating in the long, winter evening.